« Six Tools for Flex and AS3 Development | Main | Improving the Flex Ant Tasks »

Reading Flexcoders Again

We have to learn to manage information and its flow. If we don't, it will all end up in turbulence. -Grace Hopper in Prioritizing Information

About a year ago, I stopped reading flexcoders. The mailing list had become turbulence for me, something I couldn't keep up with and which I decided to stop trying to. I thought the blogs I was reading were better for learning the latest on Flex, and so I prioritized flexcoders so low on my technology reading list that it fell off.

I've started reading flexcoders again, and I'm really enjoying it. There's a lot of code to look through for features that I haven't played with, more than I find on blogs. Gmail makes sure that everything is nicely threaded, and so I can manage things better and skip most of the threads.

I've already gotten some payback for the reading through a message by Doug McCune (who I hear is co-writing a new book about Bharathanatyam dancing). It made me think more about what I write about here, that I barely ever write about the things that I'm actually working on. I haven't had a single post on advertising, Cairngorm, functional testing, or the other things I deal with daily. It's something for me to work on, along with adding more code examples.

I just checked to see when I first posted on flexcoders, and it's four years ago, writing about RemoteObject's support for AS2. It doesn't feel that long ago!

Comments (2)

Matt Hussein Platte:

Yeah, me too. It's sad that one needs to maintain one's own [flexcoders] repository in order to get decent search and threading. :(

I'm involved with FlashCoders in ten year intervals. Not sure why, but this is how it's played out.

I saw a lot of negativity and grandstanding the last time around. It really depends on the audience at the time. It takes about five years for an audience to clear out completely. There are usually various trolls who use the list for their own business reasons and the value of their opinions becomes exaggerated over time due to their sheer volume of posts. When a few people are blubbering over every post, my interest wanes.

You have to understand the posts get personal and nasty as inexperienced, insecure n00bs join up after a major release. When I've kept my posts strictly code ones, it's been hard for these people to flame me. It is a concern, obviously.